Information

The ENIAC was the first truly programmable computer. It was unveiled in 1946. That was about 61 years ago – 4,569,999,939 years after planet Earth was first formed (give or take a few million years). In those 61 years the computer has allowed man to travel to the moon and to send a land rover to Mars – a planet that is more than 35 million miles away. If you glance through the Science Channel’s 100 Greatest Discoveries you will find that many of them were made possible by the computer. This wonderful machine has allowed us to expand our intellect at an astonishing rate. My point is that, as a species, we have just begun to unravel the mysteries of the Universe. When you truly consider the big picture you can see that we are only in the infancy of discovery. There is so much that “we don’t know we don’t know”. We will one day be able to scientifically determine the origin of the Universe.

I use the advancement of the computer to illustrate how quickly information changes and advances. The reality is that we really have no choice but to base our beliefs and way of thinking on the information made available to us. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. Before then people really had no source of information to base their religious beliefs – other than what was provided by the Church. By the time that book was published Monotheistic religions had been around for more than 4,000 years. That is a long time for people to form their beliefs from a single type of informational source – and to pass them from generation to generation. Darwin’s theories have unequivocally been proven countless times since then and yet most religious people are still in denial. Evidently, changing a mindset that has been engrained into people over four millennia is not an easy task.